Re: message-subject-re

[prj@po.cwru.edu (Paul Jarc)]

Michael.Cook@cisco.com wrote:
> after seeing one too many subject lines that looked like
> 
>   Subject: Re: Fwd: FW: [list-name] RE: Fwd: foo
> 
> it occurred to me that the Re prefix has no real value.

Well, preserving all that without adding another Re: isn't a big
improvement.  Maybe it would be best to first strip away all Re:s,
Fwd:s, and such, and then prepend a single Re:.  So a response to the
above would get "Re: [list-name] foo".

Yes, the list tag should be preserved in outgoing messages, after the
Re:.  Otherwise, when it passes through the list manager, it'll come
out like "[list-name] Re: foo", which breaks everything that expects
to find an existing Re: only at the beginning.  Such programs would
then tend to add another Re: at the beginning, which exacerbates the
problem we're trying to ameliorate.

You might hide the tag from yourself when *viewing* messages, but when
responding, it'd be nice to make things come out right for people who
don't hide it.  I think doing this might be rather nontrivial, though -
when setting up the response buffer, Gnus would have to re-fetch the
article to find the tag, if any.  Or else it'd have to stash the tag
somewhere (a buffer-local variable, maybe?) when removing it.


paul